In the rapid development of industrial automation great progress has been made in the mass production of products. Starting with the concept of the assembly line, today's factories have advanced where high-quality complex products can be mass produced. However, even when an assembly line is utilized and the workpiece travels from one workstation to another at which further processing occurs to the work piece at each station, it is still frequently necessary to physically move the work piece from a conveyor belt to a tooling machine or from one type of tray to another for cleaning or testing of the work piece. Therefore, one critical operation in a factory environment is the ability to move work pieces as quickly as possible from one station to the next, or from the assembly line to the tooling machine, or from one tray to another without damaging the work piece.
In the early days of manufacturing the movement of work pieces was frequently done by human workers. Of course, this was frequently difficult, dangerous and time-consuming work. With the advent of the industrial robots a significant improvement in the movement of work pieces was achieved since the robot could be programmed to endlessly pickup and move work pieces. However, even though a robot could pickup and place the work piece faster and more consistently than a human being, it was still a relatively slow process since the robot usually only picked up and placed one work piece at a time.
Therefore, to improve the speed of moving work pieces from one area to another, robot tools were designed to pickup multiple work pieces in a row and placed them down simultaneously in a row. However, in chip manufacturing often chips are placed in nests/trays that contain several rows and several columns of individual chips. Often these chips must be moved from a nest in which some process, such as cleaning, has been performed to a tray for further processing, testing or packaging for shipment. If the nest or tray has six rows and ten columns and the robot tools can move six chips, or one row, at a time then the robot must make ten round trips to move all the chips in a nest to a tray. Even though robots may be designed for rapid movement, so many round trips would add a great deal to the manufacturing time when considering that tens of thousands of chips are continuously being output by a single assembly line in a factory.
Therefore, what is needed is a device and method that can efficiently move an entire tray of chips or work pieces. This device and method should reduce manufacturing costs by reducing the amount of time it takes to manufacture an item.